If your little brother marched right on up to you and kicked you as hard as he could in your shin, how would you feel? Pretty mad, I bet! And you’d be perfectly right to feel that way! A kick to the shin is a sin. And sin is bad, so being angry with sin is a good thing. In fact, that’s exactly how God feels about sin. Romans 1:18 says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people.”

Wrath is a fancy word for anger. Wrath is what our good Creator feels when his creatures foolishly and wickedly choose to break his good commands. It’s not wrong for God to feel this way. He’s a good God. And all of the commands he’s given us are good, too. When one of us breaks his commands, our evil deed rightfully deserves his anger!

But wrath is not the only thing our sins deserve. Romans 6:23 teaches us, “The wages of sin is death.” A wage is the pay you earn for something you do. Usually, a wage is a good thing. If you worked 40 hours a week at an ice cream stand, your boss would pay you your wage – they would give you your hard-earned money! When it comes to sin, we earn a wage, too. But the wage we earn for sin is not something pleasant like a big fat paycheck. In fact, it’s very, very bad!

When we sin, when we break the good laws of our good King, the wage we earn is death! And it’s been that way from the beginning. Think back to question 16 when we learned about the sin of our first parents. What did God say was the “wage” for eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? It was death (Gen. 2:17)! Back in the beginning, the wage for the first sin was death. And it’s true for the 100,000,000,000,000th sin, too! Every sin brings death!

As if this wage wasn’t already bad enough, this is no ordinary, one-time death. Jesus himself describes it as a forever, fiery death outside of God’s good kingdom (Matthew 25:46)! The Bible tells us that God is the great Judge over all the earth. And he wouldn’t be a good judge if he failed to punish people who do evil!

Deut. 27:26; Rom. 1:18; 2:2; Gal. 3:10; Eph. 5:6